What We’re Excited About This Back-to-School Season

McGraw Hill
Inspired Ideas
Published in
6 min readSep 4, 2024

The beginning of the 2024–2025 school year is here. Teachers are getting acquainted with new classes, new technology, and new goals. Students are beginning to explore new concepts, content, and challenges.

We’re excited to see what this school year has in store for the educators and students we serve. Below are a few trends the McGraw Hill School team is most excited about this season, in addition to the work we’re doing to ensure this back-to-school is your best yet.

Artificial Intelligence

“Teachers have had some time to experiment with GenAI, and the uses I’ve seen have reinforced my faith in their creativity. Teachers are exploring not only straightforward things like lesson planning and grading support, but also activities that empower students to engage with GenAI in appropriate ways — all with an acknowledgment of both the affordances and limitations of the technology.

And as GenAI takes its turn in the spotlight, it’s important to remember that AI in education also includes sophisticated machine-learning systems like the one powering our new early math program ALEKS Adventure, which uses Knowledge Space Theory to identify precisely what a student is ready to learn next, offering students choices that all fall squarely within their Zone of Proximal Development.”

— Dylan Arena, SVP, Chief Data Scientist, McGraw Hill School

Innovative Instructional Models

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen districts exploring innovative models for instruction and grading, such as standards-based grading or mastery learning. The transition to those models requires major shifts across a district’s infrastructure and day-to-day workflows, so we can’t expect to see transformative impacts all at once. But some of these schools are moving remarkably quickly, fostering student agency, driving personalized instruction, and leveraging data science in ways that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. I’m excited to see how these districts progress this year and what other districts begin their own transformations.”

— Jana Thompson, SVP, Chief Product Officer, McGraw Hill School

Immersive Learning Technologies

“I think we’ll see a surge in usage of immersive technologies for learning this year. We’ve already received such an overwhelming response to McGraw Hill AR, the augmented reality app we created in partnership with Verizon for its Verizon Innovative Learning initiative. The app supplements any core curriculum by providing hands-on experiences on challenging, abstract, or “routine” topics to engage students and create new opportunities for learning. We’re hearing from teachers that our AR is doing wonders for student engagement and helping to spark plenty of “ah-ha” moments. While we currently offer activities for math, science, and social studies, we expect to expand our library of content this school year.”

— Jennifer Lowe, Sr. Director, Emerging Markets, McGraw Hill School

Instruction for the Earliest Learners

“For me, one of the most rewarding elements of our work here at McGraw Hill is the privilege to support preschool teachers, who promote learning at the most formative years of a child’s life. I think that regardless of our role in education, we should all take special care to observe the artful ways in which preschool teachers are leveraging young children’s natural environments and developmental stages to make learning both playful and rigorous. This year, I’m excited to see how teachers use the newest edition of Building Blocks PreK Math to spark joy and curiosity in early math learning.”

— Mary Eisele, VP, Intervention, McGraw Hill School

Prioritization of Soft Skills

“Districts recognize the value employers place on soft skills. This school year, I expect we’ll see districts giving students plenty of opportunities to practice those skills before they enter the workforce. I’m hopeful that we’ll see an increase in attention to soft skills embedded across subject areas, particularly in career and technical education. We know that students are developmentally ready to practice these skills as early as middle school, and that when placed in a career-relevant, project-based context, working on these skills can be engaging and rewarding.”

— Patrick Keeney, Director, Career and Technical Education, McGraw Hill School

Updates and Improvements You Can Expect from Us

We’ve been working hard to ensure that the teachers and students who use our programs can get off to a strong start this back-to-school season. Here are some important updates users can expect to see while using the digital elements of our programs this year.

We’ve made a few important updates to our Open Learning Platform* that will make it much easier for teachers to navigate the digital elements of their courses. This back-to-school, it will be easier than ever to plan, teach, and assign content:

New Table of Contents

The Table of Contents for programs has been redesigned to make it easier for teachers to navigate to chapter and lesson content.

The button to access the Table of Contents has been changed to Browse This Course.

Improved Course Navigation

We’ve added new functionality to help teachers find exactly what they’re looking for within a course in less time. The new Course Navigation Panel, highlighted below, features chapters, lessons, and lesson components. This feature will give teachers additional context to understand the course scope and sequence.

*At this time, users of Reading Mastery Transformations will not see the new table of contents or the Course Navigation Panel at back-to-school 2024.

Teacher Support Panel

Florida Science, Texas Science, and California Reveal Math users will also notice additional support in the context of instruction. The new Teacher Support Panel, located on the right side of a course, gives teachers insights into the chapter or lesson objectives, standards alignment, and other important details at the point of use. The Teacher Support Panel will also consistently display quick links to the Student and Teacher eBooks everywhere in the course.

Lesson View Filter

Texas Science teachers will be able to filter the number of recommended resources they can see at a time with the new Lesson View Filter. While the programs we build are holistic and designed to work for any teaching style, our users have told us that sometimes this leads to an overwhelming amount of support to sift through. The Lesson View Filter will help make resources more manageable without eliminating any support. For example, teachers can opt to view only the assets that are required to teach state standards. The example below depicts a view called “Recommended Lesson Plan.”

Embedded Instructional Support (EIS)

Texas Science and California Reveal Math users will also find new Embedded Instructional Support, or connections to Teacher’s Editions listed and linked throughout a lesson. Embedded Instructional Support should make planning for lessons quicker and easier.

The feature is enabled by default but can be disabled by clicking the “Show Instructional Support” toggle at the top.

For more back-to-school support, including curriculum and platform training sessions, educators using McGraw Hill programs can check out:

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McGraw Hill
Inspired Ideas

Helping educators and students find their path to what’s possible. No matter where the starting point may be.